Word: firebrands
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...anyone nostalgic for the vigor of a Howard Dean speech, AL GORE may seem an unlikely fill-in. But the once wooden former Veep is reinventing himself as a finger-jabbing political firebrand. In a speech at New York University, he lashed out at the war in Iraq, demanded the resignation of six key Administration officials and called Bush "the most dishonest President since Richard Nixon." With growls for emphasis...
...Baathists and the Sadrists competing at the ballot box than taking pot shots at it. And there's good reason to believe that can be achieved in the case of Sadr, at least, who has long embraced Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani's demand for elections. The firebrand cleric has perfected the art of campaigning for Shiite popular support by attacking the Americans - the U.S. was late in recognizing that far from isolating him, American military action against Sadr was actually boosting his popularity. Current opinion surveys in Iraq find Sadr ranking second among Iraqi politicians in popular support with upward...
...using his confrontation with the Americans to challenge his political rivals in the Shiite community. Even as negotiations continue, his forces are clashing with U.S. troops at Karbala, Kufa and Baghdad. The U.S. objective may be to weaken the Mehdi militia and raise the pressure on Moqtada, but the firebrand cleric appears to be using that pressure to his own ends - particularly to challenge his more moderate rivals, chief among them Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. Sadr has long rejected what he sees as Sistani's quiescence toward the occupation, and he cleverly judged that Sistani's silence in recent days...
...dark blue Volvo sped toward the guard post near Najaf's Safi al-Safa shrine just as the muezzin began his evening call to prayers. Inside the car, three gunmen prepared to fire. Their targets were members of the Mahdi Army, a band of militants loyal to the firebrand Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who has holed up in Najaf for the past month to avoid capture by the 2,500 U.S. soldiers surrounding the city. As the Volvo neared the tiny brick-and-reed building, a gunman in the car opened up with his AK-47, hitting...
...Shiite clerical establishment at Najaf would like nothing more than to see the radical firebrand Moqtada Sadr take his militia and his confrontation with the Americans out of town. But as much as they loathe Moqtada as an upstart troublemaker, even the most moderate among them are fiercely opposed to any U.S. military operation against him in the Shiite holy city. Everyone from Grand Ayatollah Sistani, the moderate elder of the Iraqi clerics on whose consent the entire transition process rests, to Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN diplomat to whom the Bush administration is looking to devise a political formula that...